


End of the World

by kittu9



Series: The Secret No One Knows [3]
Category: xxxHoLic
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, F/M, Gen, Opium
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-20
Updated: 2011-06-20
Packaged: 2017-10-20 14:23:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/213702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/pseuds/kittu9
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's only the end of the world again, and not even the one she's in.</p><p>Yuuko contemplates her job. Clow, being a gentleman, gets her drunk. It's a workable system.</p>
            </blockquote>





	End of the World

Hey, Ichihara, he says—absentmindedly, as he has lapsed into the tone and fashion of a graduate from a men’s college addressing friend, foe, and colleague: a noncommittal invocation of the surname. Have you seen the end of the world?

Yuuko looks at Clow with an expression of disdain (the expression itself is a mask; she’s actually quite fond of Clow’s company. He’s appallingly good-natured and even more appallingly insightful, when he puts his mind to it. Also--for a seer, leastways--he’s remarkably easy to get a rise out of). She doesn’t answer his question because it is a thoughtless one; a world is subject to one’s definitions and experiences, one’s dreams and hopes and ideas of little import. Regardless, she’s seen more than one stop existing.

He turns to her: I’ve had another vision, he says. It was something to see.

Aren’t they all, she answers laconically, leaning away from him so as to inhale another sweet lungful from a gently smoldering pellet of opium. She’s put out tonight, edgy; three and twelve fifteenths of a dimension away, someone she has been watching has broken his neck (so much for learning to fly, she supposes). She’s hungry for something—tragedy, probably, the same way that she’s also a glutton for punishment—and she wants to be drunk.

Clow interprets her mood with the tact of a different century and gallantly offers to wine her (this is a substantial offer; when out, Yuuko disregards food—hence his exclusion of ‘dine’ in his offer—and she sustains her capricious self with great quantities of liquor and a cocktail of inhalants that are quasi-legal at best). They decide to stay in, however, and haul out the usual suspects (who will be downright criminal in morning, when light and sound will be painful and sharp with the aftereffects): refined rice wine, a few swaggering Caribbean rums (which Clow will never like), a particularly delinquent brand of whiskey of dubious parentage. Yuuko drinks herself past good humor, past lucidity, and well past giving a fuck, let alone a damn, about anything but the bottom of her glass. Clow mostly watches, occasionally fading out of his self-imposed lucidity to sip at the rice wine, wince down the whiskey.

It’s a long night. Yuuko culminates the event by vomiting up a potent, copious and continuous stream of alcohol, quarts more than what would have killed someone who was human or who cared. It is Clow’s private opinion that Yuuko is vomiting for the sole purpose of drinking even more—it wouldn’t be unlike her, as she’s been oddly unhappy this century—but he holds back her hair anyway and giver her his pocket handkerchief, preventing Yuuko from wiping her mouth on a sheaf of their research notes.

She falls quiet in the pale hours before dawn, after Clow has fallen into a sober doze. She sits and stares at him until the sun stops threatening and rises already. Ignoring her headache and knowing every anguished second that awaits (despite this knowledge, somehow), she lets him stay.

It’s always the end of the world again, she thinks, and then wonders what ever to wear today—the sun has, after all, finally come out.


End file.
